Between the stimulus and a small drop in unemployment insurance filings last week, to 712,00 vs a forecast of 725,000, stock markets are again off to the races, except for GE. (Oppenheimer chopped its GE rating to neutral from outperform today.) The jobless number was at a 4-month low.

The boom which so far excluded Nasdaq shares now encompasses them too, and US and global markets are all kicking high in tandem. The European central bank is joining our Fed in buying assets to push down yields and push up bond prices. Luckily the sky is overcast today so I am not tempted to play hookey. However, my brokerage account access has crashed so this is an incomplete blog.

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Upgrades in Tech

With interest rates lower, the penalty for buying tech stocks has fallen because dividends are not as attractive.

*NIO raced up 4.4% at the opening and now is up 7.42% after Mizuho analyst Vijay Rakesh upgraded the Chinese electric vehicle maker to buy with a $60 target price

*Chicago brokerage BTIG meanwhile upgraded Mercado Libre from hold to buy, 2 notches, despite MELI earning only $1.02 in Q4 earnings vs prior-year level of $1.11. MELI is up 10%+ to $1579.57.

*Nokia opened up 2.3% today and now higher because it restated some1 of its financials for 2020 because of new rules, and also licensed Samsung for some of its video standard for an undisclosed payment. Last night AT&T T reported a successful vRAN test using NOK's RAN (open radio access network) for 5G. I have no idea what this means but it boosted both stocks.

*Qualcomm is up ~4% in the tech revival after QCOM upped its divvie by 4.6% to 68¢ yesterday. It also has to boost output of its chips to meet smartphone demand from Sansung.

*Canadian BCE was upgraded to buy for medium-term gains by Royal Bank of Canada analysts who like its scale edge and efficiencies in fiber-to-the-home on which Bell will spend C$1.1 bn over the next 2 years. While its fees hit provincial ceilings the local govts also want to offer more broadband services in rural areas, so BCE has an out. The market is unsure of this and BCE shares are flat.

*Also up north, CAE was tipped by RBC analysts as the maker of aviator training systems will gain from the end of COVID-19. CAE is up 1.65% in US trading today.

*Investor A/B gained 2.1% today. The Swedish holding company owns a chunk of Nasdaq which is up. It also may own stocks that are doing better in Nordic lands not in its top 10.

Drug Stocks

*HSBC which is closing US retail brokerage accounts (including mine) upgraded Grifols SA of Barcelona to buy from hold because GRFS more than doubled its eps in Q3 to 45¢/sh. My ACAT of my stock holdings at HSBC was blocked by TD Ameritrade for holding illegal penny stocks, but of course, my bank holdings were deemed legal by the bank. I opened a Schwab account last night to house my penny stocks from Australia, Thailand, and Hong Kong which it would only sell (and charge me hugely for this to boot.)

*Today's Financial Times “Lex” column enthusiastically welcomed the Glaxo-Vir monoclonal antibody booster which “can work wonders”, an unusual headline from the pink paper. The GSK shares is up all of 0.06%. It also reported that the Oxford-Astra Zeneca jab has been suspended by Denmark, Norway, and Iceland after a woman died after being inoculated and that the JnJ single-dose vaccine rollout is likely to be slow. AZN fell 0.75%.

*Canada's Abcellera (ABCL) gained another 6.4% after its advanced COVID-19 trial for bamlanivimab (with Eli Lilly) given to patients with etesevimab cut the risk of hospitalization and death by 87% vs placebo.

*Fellow Canadian Aurinia Pharma, AUPH, rose 4% at the opening and is now up 3.2%.

*Israeli BiolineRX gained 5.65% today. BLRX.

*Compugen gained 9.2% still probably because of its cancer immunology revelations about checkpoints. It is now up 7.5%. CGEN.

*Enlivex is up 5.34%, ENLV is also doing work on checkpoint inhibitors.

*Gene tester Thermo Electron, TMO, is up over 4.2% to $459.78, my largest stake in this sector.

*Illumina gained over 4% today, ILMN.

*Zymeworks, picked by Martin Ferrera, is up another 3.65% today to $36.1. ZYME makes multifunctional biotherapies to attack cancers with more than one target, now no longer limited to 2.

*Novocure rose 6.53% today to $137.8. It may have a system for electrocuting cancers. NVCR.

*Teva fell back 1% after rising Weds. Israeli markets are closed Fridays. It may be because the Sacklers upped their opioid settlement with Uncle Sam to $4.3 bn. TEVA is also in trouble over pushing drugs, but not as egregiously

*The new Pfizer-BiNTech jab may stop the spread of COVID-19 by people who are asymptomatic.

Energy

*Microsoft gained 2.75% today after it sponsored a carbon capture project with Danish wind energy company Orsted and Norwegian green energy firm Aker ASA which invested in bitcoins earlier this week. MSFT.

*Canadian Solar, CSIQ, is up 7.53%, after beating earnings today because it sold 2 further Japanese solar projects for C$283 mn to Canadian Solar Infrastructure Fund of which it owns 15%. It has another 25 solar plants in Japan to monetize later. The sold sites are the Oita-Hiji-machi and Miyago Ogawara projects producing 53 megaWatts and 8mW respectively. It sold another in 2020 to an outsider. Its 2-sided solar panels are made in China. The forecasts were for earnings drops. It lost about 1% of the gains by 2 pm.

*Mexican Cemex which is acquiring Beck Readymix Concrete of San Antonio, TX, was upgraded by Scotiabank to hold as it is filling a gap in its Texas quarries, the lack of clinker. This note may have been written before the Texas power outages from snow and blizzards. CX is up 3.9% today.

*Azure Power Global of Mauritius which sells solar panels to India, is up 6.66%. AZRE.

*Royal Dutch Shell B (RDS-B) fell 0.6%. BP plc rose 0.2%. Schlumberger Ltd, SLB, fell 1.35%.

*Energy Fuels, UUUU, which is extracting rare earths from uranium, rose another 6% today. It is helping cut US, Canadian, and European dependence on Chinese production of rare earths, and vanadium. Moreover, it doesn't cause as much pollution as Chinese plants. It reportedly will be the first beneficiary of the EPA $1 bn cleanup subsidy for old mines and dumps in the US Southwest, to be processed at its Utah White Mesa Mill, the only one licensed in the USA. The advisory came from Chris Temple of National Investor Publishing of St. Augustine, a newsletter, forwarded by Investor's Digest of Canada. I have long recommended UUUU.